23 August 2018 - Glasgow

Once you know how doppler radars really work it's clear to see why our weather has changed so much since the implementation of the upgrade to dual polarization for the UK doppler radar network:

"Dual Polarization will certainly significantly change your weather. All of these things are of course prototyped here in the U.S., and their abilities changed drastically with the Dual Polarization upgrades. Stands to reason of course… Without Dual Pol, they had no control over the Vertical Plane. Next upgrade after that (which is really full system change) is Phased Array… which I’m fairly certainly all of our US Nexrad stations have been converted to by now. Certainly all of the critical ones have."
WW101

"Planar polarization is in the low-speed (1-x) range. This "dual polarization" includes the orthogonal polarization plane, so when it interacts with water, it will no longer be planar but circular polarization, moving it into the intermediate speed (2-x) range, due to the 2D shearing effect. Circular polarization causes torque, which means it creates excess energy within the water droplets, causing them to spin and heating them up, basically making micro-tornadoes in the cloud, causing drops to get sucked together into much larger drops--torrential downpours." - this is what is happening when you see "fuzzy" clouds
BP

As always, the time-lapse video below is very revealing...

23 August 2018

23.08.18 - NEXRAD Dual Polarization Doppler Radar - Creating Rain:
https://youtu.be/M-NCoJzyvZg